The tour of Australia by South Africa's cricket team last southern summer emboldened an aspect of Australian society that the country - like any civilised nation - would prefer not to have to admit to: South Africa's players were racially abused by local crowds. With the Ashes approaching, Australian cricket authorities have announced a zero-tolerance approach to such transgressions, threatening lifetime bans from their ground. The difficulty they face is deciding whether the term most likely to be applied to the opposition during this series - Pom - is, in fact, abusive. It's a tricky one. No one would classify Pom alongside such deeply offensive terms as "Paki" or "Kaffir", the racist taunts to which the South Africans were subjected. But nor is it an affectionate nickname, like "Kiwi", or "Yank", which New Zealanders and Americans often apply to themselves.

No solid consensus exists regarding Pom's origins. There is a traditional folk explanation: that it has roots in Australia's beginnings as a penal colony, that Pom (or POHM) was stitched into convict uniforms as an abbreviation of Prisoner Of His Majesty, but no such outfits have ever been discovered. It is now thought that it is most likely to be an abbreviation of pomegranate, the fruit which pasty British newcomers to the sun-cooked antipodes swiftly came to resemble. Whatever its roots, the word Pom has, in the Australian vernacular, universally recognised associations of chinless effeminacy, haphazard dentistry, dubious hygiene and tireless bellyaching (eg "as dry as a Pommy's bath towel", as a simile denoting extreme thirst).

The view of Australia's human rights and equal opportunities commission is that Pom, while hardly a compliment, isn't quite an insult: it has ruled that Australian fans may utter it, though it wearily acknowledges that Pom might stray into the realm of racism when deployed in conjunction with words commonly associated with the term.

This Australian commentator feels obliged to observe, however, that it's a sad day when we can't call a Pom a whingeing, bath-shy, snaggle-toothed bastard in our own cricket grounds.